Women’s rights and Clara Schumann’s wrongs

A teenage pupil of a C of E school set out to address a terrible injustice: her school A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, of whom – are you sitting down? – all are MEN.

I don’t know how well they teach music at her school, but their standards of indoctrination in the fine points of PC jargon are highly advanced.

The silly girl (and all teenagers are silly by physiological definition) must be a star pupil, for she wielded terms like ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’ with nothing short of grown-up fluency.

Now any grown-ups in a position of power ought to have told the PC twit not to bother her empty little head with stupid ideologies and concentrate instead on her studies. But hey, it’s the 21^st century we’re living in, remember?

Hence the twit’s campaign was avidly supported by The Girls’ Day School Trust, leading academics and even some composers. As a result, the school issued an abject apology and vowed to amend its ways.

The twit gloated with indecent joy: “They automatically saw the need to rectify this and are making changes as soon as possible for the new course. They are also reviewing their other qualifications to ensure they are diverse and inclusive.”

Now on a roll, she submitted a list of female composers whose omission formed a gaping hole in her musical education: “I’d like to study Clara Schumann to learn about her piano music. That would be interesting.”

Now Clara, one of the best pianists of her time, herself didn’t consider her compositions to be interesting enough. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her recitals, as was then a common practice. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

This she realised and stopped composing, dedicating her life instead to performances, mainly of the music by two towering geniuses: her husband Robert and her admirer (probably also lover) Johannes Brahms.

But of course a little girl whose brain isn’t yet even wired properly can judge such matters better than Mr and Mrs Schumann. She’s armed with a progressive ideology denied 19^th century musicians, and that gives her deeper insights.

Judging by some Radio 3 programmes, the twit is actually quite precocious, for plum-voiced announcers also seem to think that Clara’s compositions were every bit her husband’s equal. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times that Clara, a victim of her pre-PC time, didn’t have proper recognition because as a woman she was denied her basic right to be taken seriously.

I haven’t been privy to the twit’s full list of unjustly ignored female composers, but I do know that, in addition to Clara, it also included pop musicians Annie Lennox and Carole King, who have about as much to do with music as they do with Grand Prix racing.

But can you imagine the ensuing hysteria if our educational boards were to announce that only classical music would be taught academically, because no other music is a proper academic subject? My imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

Anyway, having read the article, my concert pianist wife, my professional mezzo-soprano friend and I tried to compile our own list. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, we came up with only two composers of note.

One was the sublime 12^th century composer Hildegard von Bingen, a Catholic nun. The other is an interesting contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Putting me to shame, the girls also managed to name half a dozen others, mostly sub-minor 19^th century figures filling the timeline demarcated by Hildegard at one end and Sofia at the other.

But the two names worthy of study could teach the twit quite a few things about fields other than music, and dollars to doughnuts, as Americans say, they probably didn’t even make her list.

Hildegard von Bingen, named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI, lived in an era not known for its commitment to women’s rights – quite the contrary.

Yet Hildegard didn’t complain about this injustice. She was too busy founding Benedictine monasteries and convents, writing poems, liturgical songs, scientific works, philosophical tracts – and some of the most moving music ever written.

If she lived in a misogynist (to use modern jargon) time, Gubaidulina lives in a misogynist country, Russia. As an ethnic Tartar she has probably suffered a fair share of double-whammy discrimination.

Yet she didn’t complain either, and anyway Russia hasn’t been blessed with Equal Opportunities Commissions instituted to process such complaints. Instead she wrote her spiritual, mystic music profoundly alien to the regime both in its content and modernist form.

True talent will out no matter what, and these two women must be studied in any serious music course not because they are women, but because they are serious musicians. Primary sexual characteristics just aren’t a sufficient qualification.

Would I be able to explain this to the PC twit hung up on ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’? Probably. But not so she’d understand: the cancerous corruption of modernity has in her case reached Stage IV.